How to Escape From a Leper Colony (2 page)

Slowly the festivities disappeared. The busy road turned into a dusty path where there were odd crisscross markings in the dirt that my mother said were from an automobile, like the one we had seen. After hours of walking, and my mother telling stories of her young life in Namakkal, we could more than smell the ocean, we could hear it. And then we were walking along a wood dock with the sea beneath us. My mother sat me down with my legs hanging over the side and pointed to the small mound many miles out into the ocean. That would be my new home, she told me, where the nuns would take me in and bless me with the sacrament of Confirmation when I was older. She did not say, if I lived to be older. Instead she kissed me on the mouth and made me promise not to eat the sweets. And she left. And then it was so quiet, with only the waves and the breeze as sounds of life, that I closed my eyes and pretended that I was back in the junction, eating oysters in pepper sauce, putting them in my mouth with my good hand.

My arm was wrapped and in a sling. When the wagon driver had asked, my mother told him I had broken it and she was taking me to an obeah man. I was ashamed that she had been made to sin, to tell a lie, because of me. Even in my mind I could not forget how my elbow was hurting me in a funny way that wasn’t about pain. Even alone on the dock I was too afraid to touch it, to give that arm the healing power of the other one. I was afraid to touch places on me that weren’t even private. And I was going to die for it. Die for having those places. My mother held my hand, then left.

It was not a parade of white nuns who came for me. It was a lay volunteer, all wrapped in cloth. Someone doing community service for a crime committed or someone doing penance for a sin confessed. “Get in the boat,” he directed. In his voice I knew that he was a man, for nothing in his gauzed body revealed it. I could not tell if he was Indian or African or French. The skin around his eyes was covered in a dark protective salve. We did not speak as we motored the five miles to Chacachacare.

At the Chacachacare dock he told me to go, go. I tucked the sweets under my arm and heaved myself—one-handed—out of the boat. The boat sped off to the safer, healthy side of the island. I faced the intake house. It was a welcoming hue. Not the color of sores or withered limbs. The walls were blue, a mother’s color, and the trimmings were green, the color of life. I did not think I would be unhappy here.

I presented the bag of sweets to the young nun who greeted me. She cradled it with her gloved hands and smiled. Then she sent me to bathe in the sea. “Hurry,” she said. “Before it gets dark.” I did as I was told. I knew that the Caribbean Sea could heal many things. If you have a cold, go bathe in the sea. If you are melancholy, go bathe in the sea. If you are a leper, go bathe in the sea—but on the lepers’ side.

He was there on the beach when I came out of the water. Lazaro was not the name he was born with. He was given that name because he refused to die. He was sixteen when I met him that first day, older than me by two years but much smaller in size. I stood a head above him. I had some softness in places, chest and cheek, where he seemed hollow. He had been born in the colony and still showed no signs of leprosy and no signs of leaving. The world would not have him. Surely the leprosy would show soon. In truth, he had nowhere to go. His mother, a dougla, had passed on her mixed genes. One could not tell if Lazaro was African or Indian—there was talk that there was French in him, too. That his father was French. That his father was one of the French priests who came over once a week to celebrate the Mass. Who is to know? The dougla, the mixed race, might be a type of chameleon. They can claim any heritage they desire. They can claim all if they like. Though it is true that not all will claim them in return.

“Is your father they burning tomorrow?” he asked me as he skipped stones into the water.

The sun was almost down. My sari, a lovely red but frayed in places, clung to me, and I felt cold. He wore only a pair of children’s short pants. I hadn’t thought about my father all day. “I been thinking they would bury him, even though he Indian.”

“You thinking wrong. Here we all Indian, no matter how much African we have in us.”

We began to walk back to the surgery, where I would spend the night. The nuns, who were our nurses, hadn’t decided yet on my treatment. I looked over Lazaro’s small body. “Where your leper part?”

“I all leper.”

“Where?”

He tugged at the crotch of his pants. “In my head.” I expected him to pull his thing out and show it to me shriveled. I waited anxiously. “The next head, rude girl.” He laughed loud enough that I grew ashamed I had been staring. He pointed to his temple. “It’s in my mind.”

On my second day I watched them push my father’s wrapped body into the crematorium. The nun who had sent me to the sea, Sister Theresa, stood with her many replicas. Their white faces pink with the heat, their hair covered in veils with blue bands about the forehead. They were all young enough to be my mother—not like the old dogs at my school in Trinidad who wore huge winglike headdresses. I didn’t understand why they cremated the lepers when they seemed to have so much bare land on the island. When I asked Sister Theresa she told me that this was okay because so many of the lepers are Hindu anyway.

But it wasn’t okay, not really. Because my mother is a Christian and she told me that if I went to Chacachacare the nuns would feed me better than she could, and give me medicine that she could not, and that I would be buried under a stone like Jesus.

There were two churches. One for the Catholics where the nuns joined us on Sundays and one for the Protestants—who were thought of as exotic. There wasn’t any place for Hindus. Though my parents were both Indian, only my father had been Hindu. From him I knew that the Hindu god wasn’t so different from the Christian god. One manifestation came in many dozens of forms while the other version came in only three. But the same god. The same jealous god, the same god who fell in love. The Christian god even sometimes fell in love with men, like King David. “God loved King David the way a woman loved a man.” My mother would slap my father in the face when he said things like that. Then she would accept his cuffs as her martyrdom. When he showed the first signs of leprosy in his fingers she told him that it was God’s punishment. But he would not repent. For me, it was easy to chant about Jesus Christ and slip in a Lord Krishna here and there.

For many days the nuns did not know where to put me. I slept in the surgery where they took blood and logged my wounds into a tablet with only my given name, Deepa, in block letters. One option was an Indian woman who had left her child behind with family when she became a leper. She wanted me, but the nuns thought that this might be bad for us both. I, an Indian child, had left a mother behind. It was too perfect to be healthy. The nuns were not keen on putting me with a young man or even with a man and his wife. I could be temptation. Nuns knew about temptation.

They put me in a one-room house with an old African woman. “This your bed,” she said. “Yours against the wall and mine besides the door. This so if there is a fire my old leper legs will have less distance to go. Is also so I can keep my eye on your comings and goings. There’s all kind of talk of a cure for the leprosy and if you go back to your mother I don’t want she to think I been raising you poorly.” Her name was Tantie B. I had never known my grandparents, since my mother had sailed over from Madras in southern India before I was born. I knew only southern Trinidad. Tantie B was my grandmother in Chacachacare. And Lazaro was my brother.

For the first months after I arrived Lazaro would take me for walks. The island was green with palm and sea grape trees. It was loud with the howler monkeys that snored all day and mated all night. Lazaro and I often went beyond the fence that kept the lepers to the leper side. We would climb under it, through a gorge deep enough for a body. It had been first dug out by an iguana and now maintained by Lazaro. We would climb trees. We would eat green fruit and spit the seeds out, aim for lizards and fire ants. One day Lazaro took me farther than he had before.

“There,” he said, pointing down the hill to a clearing with spots of gray. “The nun burial ground. That’s where they put the nuns’ bodies. That’s where I want to be buried.”

“But you ain a nun.”

“Who say?”

“You a boy. You couldn’t be a nun.”

“Why I can’t be a nun? Didn’t Peter take over the family after Jesus dead, like widows does do? Peter get to be buried under some rock. I want a rock over me.”

We climbed down the hill to look at the burial site. The grounds were clean but sharp with ankle-high grass. When we walked we made a swishing sound like waves. The stones over the graves were marked: Sister Marie, Lover of the Lord; Sister Margaret, Lover of the Word; Sister Ann, Lover of the poor and the wretched. We sat among the stones. Lazaro patted my arm gently.

“Soon they going have to chop some of it away.”

“I know.”

“You afraid?”

“Yes.”

“You brave?”

“Yes.”

“What you love?”

“My mother.”

“And who she?”

“She …” I paused. I had not seen or heard from my mother in months. I had not expected her to write because she had had very little schooling. But what was she now? Was she a new wife? Was she going to be someone else’s mother? “She a woman who works in the cane field. She does pray to Saint Anne to send her signs.” I pushed some dirt around with my toe. “Who was your mother?” I already knew of Lazaro’s tragedy from the little things Tantie B had whispered to me at night, and the stories Babalao Chuck told in the clearing when Lazaro was off helping haul in the goods from the delivery boat. I knew, but it still seemed the right thing to ask. I lowered my head so Lazaro would know I did not mean to be bold.

“My mother is the woman who tell me that I was her miracle. I was her sign.” With his hand he raised my face so that our eyes met. I felt my skin grow warm and loose. “She tell me a island could be like a world.” He spoke softly and I could see that his eyes were heavy with their water. “Try a next thing,” he breathed out, so that I realized there had been a long silence. “Everyone love their mother. What else you love?”

I thought about this. I let my good hand run through the sharp grass, feeling the tiny cuts opening on my fingers. “My own-self,” I answered at last.

“Then on your grave it will say ‘Sister Deepa, Lover of She-self.’”

“What your stone going say?”

“Brother Lazaro, Lover of Deepa.”

I sat on a stone with markings that were clear and fresh. I felt the curved coolness though my clothes. It wasn’t smooth. It was rough and the thin cloth of my sari did not do much to cushion me. I lifted my feet to try to balance. To try to press the cold stone onto me. “Don’t fall,” he said.

“I won’t.” But I got up anyway. “Why we here?”

“Because we lepers.”

I nodded. “But why here-here?” I spread my arms wide to mean the world.

Lazaro shrugged. “You don’t listen to the priest on Sunday?”

“I never understand what he does say.”

“We here because God want somebody to know him.”

“Like a friend?”

“Like when someone know you it make you real. Like the tree that fall in the forest when nobody was around. God had want to be heard.”

“A tree fall in the forest?”

“All the time.”

I could not help myself. Suddenly my body felt heavy. Suddenly I felt alone. I walked over to him and bent into his small chest. I cried loudly. I cried for my mother. “I’m here,” Lazaro said. And he said it over and over again.

The doctor dressed in white. He covered his hair and face. Only his eyes showed and I couldn’t tell if he was French and tanned, or African but light, or Indian even. I imagined he was my father, whom I couldn’t really remember. I imagined this as he leaned into my face and his face turned hazy and then disappeared. I slept as he carved out the muscle around my elbow, which wasn’t much muscle to begin with as I was still only fourteen and quite skinny. “They didn’t cut your arm off,” a nun said to me and smiled when I awoke. And I knew that was something to be thankful for.

I was allowed to watch a movie two nights later at the small cinema that had been built for the volunteers and the nuns. Once a month was leper night—for those of us who had gone to Mass every Sunday and for those of us who had been to hospital. I invited Lazaro and they allowed him to come even though neither the Protestant nor the Catholic church could claim him in their congregation. And he was not ill. He was never ill.

The lepers sat in the front rows. The nuns sat in the very back, like chaperones. The movies that were brought were old movies. Movies that were already old in Trinidad, where my mother was. They weren’t even talkies, most of them. Silent things with caresses so passionate they made even the nuns giggle loudly.

Movies are like so much art. They can start a revolution. This was not a movie about war. Or about race and oppression; no one talked about those things in 1939. A man loved a woman. A woman loved a man. They were willing to do bad things for that love.

I was not yet sixteen when we made the biggest decision of our lives. Lazaro was almost eighteen. Appropriate ages for independence. We went into the jungle of the island to build it. We stole wood meant to steady the leper houses. This was more important. Tantie B did not know what we were doing. I was still alive. She was still alive. Babalao Chuck was dead. I did not go to see him cremated. I believed his stories. I believed he had flown away. He said his Orisha had taught him. I told Tantie B that Lazaro and I were going to build us a house, separate and away from the other houses. And because all every leper wanted was a world that was the same as Trinidad, just with limbs that were fragments of the big island’s, a vacation home in leper town didn’t seem unbelievable. “Every young couple need some privacy for when they wed,” Tantie B mused. And I imagine she thought that Lazaro and I were in love. I cannot blame her. I thought the same.